Massie's NICS Data Reporting Act Passes the House
Massie's NICS Data Reporting Act passes the House — due-process and Second Amendment work from his official channel.
Original by RepThomasMassie on YouTube ↗ · Is this yours? Claim credit →
Chapters
Transcript
Download captionsClick any timestamp to jump to that moment.
- For what purpose does the gentleman from Kentucky seek recognition? >> Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass HR 2267 as amended.
- >> report the title of the bill. >> HR 2267, a bill to require the Attorney General to submit to the Congress a report that includes the demographic
- data of persons determined to be ineligible to purchase a firearm based on a background check performed by the National Instant Criminal Background
- Check System. >> Pursuant to the rule, the gentleman from Kentucky, Mr. Massie, and the gentlewoman from North Carolina, Ms. Ross, each will control 20 minutes. The
- chair recognizes the gentleman from Kentucky. >> Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all members have five legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and to insert extraneous
- material on HR 2267. >> Without objection. >> I yield myself as much time as I may consume. >> from Kentucky is recognized.
- >> Mr. Speaker, today we are bringing to the floor the NICS Data Reporting Act. It was inspired in the Judiciary Committee with a conversation by a
- conversation that I had with the late Sheila Jackson Lee. I became aware of a a problem with the NICS Background Check System
- um because John Lott, who's an author, an economist, and statistician, author of many books, um worked at the Department of Justice and has been privy
- to some of the state and has discovered that the NICS Background Check System doesn't work like we think it does or may actually, in fact, have a racial uh
- prejudice built into it. That's a problem because the right to keep and bear arms, like all fundamental rights protected in the Constitution and given
- to us by God, um should not be based on race, sex, or religion. The NICS system,
- that stands for National Instant Criminal Background Check System, is a program that it was instituted many years ago that you have to go through
- when you want to purchase a firearm. You fill out fill out a form 4473 at the gun store, and you record some
- affirmations on there that you're not a felon, um that you don't use drugs, and you also put on there your demogra- some demographic data. Well, the DOJ collects
- this data, but they've never let us see it, and I think we could learn some things and improve their system if we could see this data. If Now, as soon as you fill out the
- form, they send it in to the central database, and they check to see if you are a prohibited person. In other words, have you been convicted of a crime for
- which you could serve a year or more? Or have you been mentally adjudicated as defective according to this system?
- What happens when it does this check is the computers will look for phonetically similar names. And if you share a name,
- unfortunately, with somebody who is a criminal, even if you're not a convicted criminal yourself, you could be denied the purchase of a firearm. In fact,
- there have been 2 million denials since this system was put into place in the '80s, and in any given year we've seen
- over 100,000 denials, but we know these are mostly false denials cuz there have only been 12 federal convictions in a year where there were 100,000 denials.
- And um what's pro- the problem is you can appeal this, and if it's your first appeal, you don't get it overridden, you
- have to employ lawyers, and now when you have to spend a lot of money to exercise a constitutional right, you're effectively being deprived of that
- right. Um and here's what we believe, that if you looked at the data, what you will find is that black Americans are three times
- more likely to get a false denial in the NYX background check system and that Hispanic Americans are twice as likely
- to get a false denial from the NYX background check system as a white American might be. Why is this? Because
- they share similar names, surnames, and first names within racial and ethnic groups. And so if you're in one of these
- groups and share one of these names with somebody who's been convicted, you can be deprived of the ability to purchase the gun. So this is a problem. We we want to see
- the data and that's the purpose of this bill. And with that, I reserve the balance of my time. >> The gentleman from Kentucky is recognized. >> Mr. Speaker, I want to be clear about
- the purpose of the bill. It's not to collect more information on prospective gun buyers. It's to know what the information we have, what's been collected. Do we
- what can we infer from those things? So for instance, on the form, we already collect race and ethnicity. The purpose of this bill is not to tell us
- individual details about the people who purchase the guns. We want to know this these numbers in the aggregate so that nobody's particular
- um traits or names will be disclosed as gun owners. We just need to know what it looks to like statistically. There's been a question from some of my
- conservative colleagues as to why the bill asks for both gender and sex. Um the reason for that is before 2016,
- the form 4473 used to ask what your gender was. And after 2016, it asks what your sex is. So the language of the law
- doesn't suggest that those two things are different things. It just acknowledges that the data that's been collected over the years has been collected under two different terms and
- we want to know all of the data. Um you know, imagine if a bank, which also does background checks on its
- prospective tellers and employees of the banks, imagine if a bank had an error in their system, which caused black tellers
- or Hispanic tellers to fail the background check more than white tellers um or bank other bank employees. The bank would be sued out of existence.
- Yet, we have a government system, which we believe probably does this. And so, that's why we need to know the data. And then, my goal with this is that we
- improve the system. That if we make it not sloppy, because what will the improvement yield? It will take out the racial bias in the system that exists
- right now, but it will also mean that all races, whether you're white, black, Hispanic, Asian and whether you're male
- or female, there will be no bias, because we will check for your actual name and your actual birthday and clean this system up. And with that, I would
- like to reserve my time. >> The gentleman from Kentucky is recognized. >> I thank you and um I want to also thank uh Mr. Hank Johnson from Georgia, who's
- also a member of the Judiciary Committee, who in fact improved this bill before it came to the floor. We marked it up in Judiciary. He had a suggestion and in order not to delay the
- bill or the passage of it through committee, I assured him that I would work with him before it came to the floor. A lot of times that's a euphemism and it never happens, but we did in fact
- insert the uh language from Hank Johnson's office directly into this bill and not because I wanted to cut a deal, but because it actually made the bill
- better. We will find out not just the demographics of the denials, but also the demographics of the of the uh people who overturned their denials. And this
- is important, too, for improving the system. So, with that, I urge passage of this bill and I yield back the balance of my time.
- >> The gentleman yields. The question is will the house suspend the rules and pass the bill HR 2267 as amended. Those in favor say I.
- Those opposed, no. In the opinion of the chair, two-thirds being in the affirmative, the rules are suspended, the bill is passed without objection. The motion to reconsider is
- laid on the table.